#now excuse me while i go reread the manga (aka the TRUE version of the story) for the 1290872398750392785th time

[novelmonger]

Thoughts on FMA: The Final Alchemy

tl;dr - All the live-action FMA movies suck like an industrial-grade vacuum cleaner, and watching them will only not be a waste of your time if you do so with friends who are already familiar with FMA so you can have fun bashing them with each other. Still, this one managed to suck ever so slightly less than the previous one...maybe???

Elaborating slightly on the notes I took while watching, here are my thoughts:

I can't get over how unbelievably stupid and nonsensical the title is! "ThE fInAl AlChEmY" What does that even mean? Not "The Final Transmutation," oh no; we can't make the title be an actual reference to a line Ed actually says in the original ("the last transmutation of the Full Metal Alchemist" or however it's worded). "The Final Alchemy." I ask you -_-

There were so many scenes where they didn't play any music at all, and it was super awkward! What kind of creative choice is that? Instead of it being used to make a statement or ramp up tension or whatever usual reasons people have for not putting music in, it just came across like they forgot to add any music in some scenes.

What on earth is up with Raven's actor? He was overacting so much, it was distracting - especially when contrasted with Mustang's complete lack of expression, lol. It's like Raven's actor just saw that one panel of Raven guffawing and decided that was his entire character. Like...there's overacting like some of the villains in the Rurouni Kenshin movies...and then there's this. Super weird and out of place.

Not that I'm surprised at all, but the CG looked really bad for the most part in this movie. By far the worst was Sloth, though. I can't remember when the last time was I've seen something that bad x.x Not only did it look super fake, it just looked...really low-quality even compared to some of the other stuff in this movie, like a child's scribble next to an art student's painting. All of the effects around Sloth (like broken pillars and crumbling walls) looked terrible and fake too, like he was infecting the entire VFX team with his mediocrity or something.

But on the flipside, I actually thought the effect of Ed, Ling, and Envy flaking away as they went through the Portal of Truth was really good! Guess that's where all their VFX budget went.

Al's actor was nowhere near emaciated enough. Sure, they didn't go into the whole thing about Ed eating and sleeping his share, and I get that they wouldn't want to make the actor starve himself or anything...but still. Just sayin'. Also...he had zero emotion, even after soul and body were reunited. What's up with that?

And speaking of which, just like in the other two movies, they hardly had Al do anything at all, nor did most of the other characters act like they cared about him much at all - not even Ed most of the time. If I didn't have such a wealth of other versions of this wonderful character, I'd probably think he was super boring. Which is a crime, I tell you! He's one of my favorite characters ever!

So many of the sets were so empty. You could really tell when they were using greenscreens.

When they showed Greed inside Ling's head, they made him blue??? When it's supposed to be depicting the torrent of souls that is a Philosopher's Stone, and the Stones are red??? Just...why?

Oh, also...when the Stones were in a liquid form, it totally looked like sweet-and-sour sauce you get from a Chinese restaurant ^^' It was like...almost pink! Weird. I always assumed the Stones were supposed to look red like blood.

Yet again, the way they messed around with the timeline is paying dividends of confusion in this movie. Because they shoved all of Scar's character arc into the second movie, and everybody's okay with him now, they have him just come out and show Ed and Al his brother's research notes, which is how they find out about the country-wide transmutation circle, and only after that discovery does Ed decide to go to Briggs. Or how about Greed just immediately deciding to leave Father practically the minute Ling accepts him? And Father doesn't do anything about it? And later on, Greed joins up with them for literally no reason other than "lol I'm a rebel," because there was nothing about Devil's Nest or the previous Greed, so he didn't have the realization that Wrath killed his friends.

Wait. They didn't do Devil's Nest, did they? They didn't do Devil's Nest. THEY DIDN'T DO DEVIL'S NEST HOW DO YOU MESS UP THIS BADLY ALDKGFJSLKDGJSLDKGJSDKLGF

Also, because they never bothered to put Yoki into these movies, Mei's brainwave for the secrets within the notes make waaaaaay less sense. Sure, you could say her figuring it out because Yoki sneezed is too convenient, but she had even less reason to think along those lines in this movie. Oh, and they never even tried to explain why she's the only one reading the notes, and Ed and Al can't.

Buccaneer's head looks just as lumpy and bulbous as Armstrong's. Why didn't they just shave these actors' heads instead of slapping a bald cap on top of their hairy heads, or whatever they did? It would have looked a million times better.

Okay, Olivier is practically perfect in every way. A+ casting job for once. She looks about as natural as a blonde Japanese woman can, and she gets across the disdain, poise, and hyper-competence of the character really well.

They never explained why Ed can't speak freely with Olivier about the Homunculi, etc. The revelation that Winry's being used as a hostage isn't revealed yet when Ed first shows up, and Raven's not there yet, so why did they have to go to the trouble of going into the underground tunnel to talk? Yet another example of the film creators trying to condense and simplify while still keeping in iconic moments from the anime, but showing a glaring lack of understanding of why those moments happened the way they did. Because now you've got a bunch of disjointed scenes that are supposed to be iconic, but will make no sense unless you already know the story.

Speaking of which...why did Ed go to Briggs in the first place? Because he already knows about the country-wide transmutation circle at this point, his stated purpose is to stop them from carving the last crest of blood they need at Briggs and completing the circle. And yet...the crest gets carved anyway, and Ed just sort of...leaves? Without much, if any, protest? At first I thought they were going to do the whole Briggs arc because they wanted to show what I would definitely classify as an iconic moment: Ed getting impaled. But they never did that scene at all! Kimbley is absent from this movie, so there's no scheme to get Winry away from him, Raven disappears as soon as he shows up (yeah, they don't even do the memorable scene of Olivier stabbing him and shoving him into setting concrete), so they don't even need to get Winry away from him, there are no chimeras (probably because it would be quite taxing on the budget, which I kind of understand), and they've already covered the whole Winry-forgives-Scar scene in the previous movie, so I guess they decided there was no way to work in Ed falling down a mine shaft, getting impaled, and then closing his own wound by using his own soul as a Philosopher's Stone. Nope, instead they just abruptly shift to a goodbye scene between Ed and Winry whose dark hair still bugs the heck out of me whyyyyyyy is she special like that.

Wait, let me reiterate: Kimbley is absent from this movie. I actually don't remember if he was in the second movie or not (it was that forgettable if he was). Yeah, they just decided that one of the most interesting and memorable characters from FMA didn't need to be in their movie. Besides the part I mentioned above, Kimbley's absence also throws a wrench into a very important part farther down the road: Ed defeating Pride. In the original, Pride eats Kimbley to take advantage of the extra souls he has in his Philosopher's Stones, but because he absorbed such a strong, rebellious soul, Kimbley is actually able to help Ed overpower Pride in the end. This is a very important factor in Pride's defeat, because he looks down on humans, while Kimbley points out that the way he's acting is actually dishonorable. "You are nothing to be proud of," I think is how he puts it. If you consider the thematic implications of the Homunculi and how each one dies, you'll realize that this is the only way Pride could be defeated, because Homunculi are defeated by their opposites. But then, I don't think the people who wrote these movies would recognize a theme if it smacked them in the face. Many of the events are the same in these movies as they are in the original, but they're stripped of any subtlety or significance.

Oh, also Pride's death is much stupider in this movie because it looks like he just stands there and lets Ed do it, rather than it being an actual fight with the shadow-spikes and everything, and Ed getting the drop on him because he knows what it's like to be shorter than his opponent....

Okay, but one thing I will say in favor of this movie is that Ryosuke Yamada was by far the best actor in the whole cast. He captured the various sides of Ed's character, and there were far fewer moments where it felt like he was an actor on a stage than anybody else. I believed him. I've thought that in both of the previous movies, but I don't think I realized just how good of an actor he was until this installment. Because he doesn't just have to play Ed. He also has to play teenage Hohenheim in the flashback, and Father's final form on the Promised Day. And in both instances, Ryosuke Yamada utterly killed it. He didn't just do a good job of delivering the lines with appropriate emotion and expression. He also made the characters feel like completely different people. Everything, down to his stance and the way he talked, was different! And I could tell that he'd studied the way Seiyo Uchino had done his performances as both Hohenheim and Father, and was trying to match them in his own performance. That was so cool to see. I've never seen Ryosuke Yamada in anything else, but now I kinda want to.

Oh, and while we're praising the cast, Kokoro Terada did such a good job as Pride! It's a tall order to ask such a young kid to act like such a creepy monster, but he did an excellent job. That kid's got a future in acting for sure.

They cut out soooooo many of the best scenes about Mustang and his team, and what they didn't cut out was so rushed and just gutted of all emotion T_T They didn't even bother taking the team away from him, which leaves the Homunculi looking a bit stupid and lax. Because the whole fight with Lust went down differently (in the first movie a;ldkjfa;dlskf;sdlkfj DX), Havoc isn't even paralyzed! I never thought I would be upset that he didn't get paralyzed! But because we don't go into any of that, a huge chunk of character development is just gone completely. And though they did do the whole showdown with Envy, which is one of my absolute favorite parts of the story, it was taken out at the knees by the actors being terrible and emotionless. Oh, and the coup is introduced very abruptly and just as abruptly forgotten about, and there's nothing about Mrs. Bradley. And the moment with Hawkeye's neck getting sliced open? Blink and you miss it. Mustang barely reacts, and they don't even use Hawkeye's life being threatened as a way to try to coerce him to do human transmutation! Hawkeye doesn't give him the signal with her eyes, Mei doesn't close up the wound...I honestly have no idea why they bothered wounding her at all.

They already did the zombie things in the first movie (ad;lkjfgda;slkjg;sdklfj;dskfl), so they show up in one scene in this movie, have little to no impact because we've already seen them, and then are never heard from again. What even.

Why in the name of Flamel did they wait the entire movie to reveal that Miles is part Ishbalan? Why did they bother revealing that at all? They literally could have just said they were going to help Scar rebuild Ishbal, and left it at that, instead of having Miles dramatically take off his sunglasses and make the audience try to figure out why because it's not immediately obvious that his eyes are red because they made the color much duller than it is in animation and a;lkdjfg;ladkjhg;dlksgjlsdgj;ldksfjdslg

Oh, and you wanna know what the biggest kick in the teeth is? THEY DIDN'T EVEN HEAL MUSTANG'S EYES. Marcoh isn't in this movie - I can't remember if he died or what in the first movie, and can't be bothered to check - so there's no one to use the Stone on him. So Mustang's storyline in the movie ends with Hawkeye saying, "Maybe we'll find a way to heal your eyes somehow." Maybe. MAYBE?! -_-

So yeah. To sum up, this is a terrible movie and an even worse adaptation. I didn't think it was possible to take such a phenomenally good story and butcher it this badly. FMA is one of my very favorite stories of all time, and even though I've read and watched it more times than I can count, the fight scenes and tense moments still grab me to this day. But I kept on finding myself bored while watching this movie, and checking to see how much time was left. I never thought I would be bored watching the Briggs soldiers or the Armstrong siblings fight Sloth, or Wrath and Scar duking it out, or the last stand against Father.

But here we are.